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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | July 2006 
Obrador Claims Broad Conspiracy of Fraud in Mexican Elections
 Mark Stevenson - Associated Press
| | More than 150,000 supporters of Andr้s Manuel L๓pez Obrador massed at a Mexico City rally yesterday. He urged people across Mexico to begin marching to the capital Wednesday. (Associated Press) |
Mexico City Leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador claimed on Monday that a network of federal officials, prosecutors and possibly even judges collaborated in a broad conspiracy to steal last week's presidential elections.
Lopez Obrador supporters say they plan to visit foreign embassies here to demand their governments not congratulate conservative Felipe Calderon who narrowly won the July 2 race according to the official vote count until Mexican courts hear the leftist's appeals for a manual recount.
Calderon says the vote was clean and has taken congratulatory phone calls from President Bush and the leaders of Canada, Spain and Colombia, among others.
On Monday, White House spokesman Tony Snow said Bush would acknowledge any Mexican court rulings that could change who won the election.
Lopez Obrador's staff also announced that a series of marches and demonstrations across the country starting Wednesday will continue indefinitely. The leftist's supporters are planning a mass meeting for Sunday in Mexico City and simultaneous rallies other cities.
Manuel Camacho Solis, one of Lopez Obrador's campaign advisers, claimed that charges for political crimes brought by a special prosecutor days before the elections against an ex-president were part of a plan to pressure the ex-leader's Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, to support Calderon.
They went to the extreme of ordering house arrest for ex-president Luis Echeverria a few days before the election on genocide, only to drop them two or three days after the election, Camacho Solis said.
On Saturday, a federal judge threw out the charges of genocide related to the killing of student protesters in 1968, when Echeverria was interior secretary ruling that the statute of limitations had run out. The same grounds have been cited by other judges in the case.
Lopez Obrador's main hope lies in electoral tribunal appeals that charge there were nationwide violations before the election, including campaign overspending, government support for Calderon, and unfair intervention on his behalf by business and church groups.
More specific appeals are being filed in at least 151 and perhaps all of the country's 300 electoral districts, claiming mainly that ballots are either unaccounted for, or that there were more votes than ballots or registered voters, at specific polling places.
Lopez Obrador, however, did not express confidence in the country's highest electoral court.
Let's wait, he said, when asked whether he would accept the court's ruling in the case, due by August 31 and which cannot be appealed.
Vote tallies showed Calderon won by about 244,000 votes or a margin of just 0.6 percent. |
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